Highly critical comments directed at Édouard Manet's painting Incident in a Bullfight, which he had entered
in the Salon of 1864, prompted him to cut the painting apart. His friend, Antonin Proust, recalled in his memoir that the
artist "boldly took a knife and cut out the figure of the dead toreador." He did not mention that Manet
saved a second section of the canvas: The Bullfight, now in The Frick Collection, New York.

The Dead Toreador in the National Gallery of Art would have made up most of the lower left part of
the original composition. The Bullfight is the upper right-hand section. Manet later reworked both pieces,
developing them into the images we know today.